Mars

I became a scientist because of Star Trek.

Several years ago, a poll of Canadian engineering students showed that a huge percentage chose their field because of Scotty. As a reward, that college awarded James Doohan (the actor who originally played Scotty) with an honorary engineering Ph.D.

The poll results came as no surprise to me. Secretly, I picked engineering because I, too, wanted to be like Scotty. Reflecting upon it, I suspect every choice over the last two decades has been in some way designed to prepare me to captain, repair, or secure the Enterprise.

Similarly, I’ve wanted to go to Mars ever since I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars series for the first time. Factors which have held me back are mostly fear—not fear of space, but fear of loss.

Astronauts experience rather significant bone loss in space. Over the long term, I suspect bone loss is the smallest loss of all. For example, I perform (and feel) poorly when the sun abandons us for more than a few days. I have panic attacks when my sleep cycle goes out of sync. What would happen to me in the blackness of space?

But I never feared what could go wrong. At least, not until I started reading this article, about an ion engine that could take someone to Mars in thirty-nine days (as opposed to six months).

Dr. McCoy says in the new Trek, sounding oddly like Legolas, “Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence.” As I read the article, that line popped into my head.

Suddenly I felt very nauseous. I had to put down whatever I was gnawing on.

In space, your destination is down—at least as described by Ender’s Game. The destination is always down. If one heads to the moon, that’s downward; upon arriving, if one turns around to come back, Earth is downward. When hopping from Earth to Luna or back, it’s a pretty small jump, and likely hard to miss—though there is a risk of puddling with a too-quick descent, naturally.

Mars, on the other hand, is very far away, and moving pretty quickly. Imagine jumping out of the space station, engaging your rockets to enter the atmosphere, and then parachuting and trying to land on a four-foot-by-four-foot raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Except that if you miss Mars, even by a little bit, there’s no coming back. And your only opportunity to steer is when you first engage your rockets. Oh, and you’re blindfolded.

I think I’ll stay here for now, thanks.

But it’s still very tempting.

Note to self. An interesting experiment might be to put the board of directors of the National Rifle Association on a ship to Mars, with everything they need to survive, plus one gun and bullets for each of them. I have my suspicions about what would happen, but at the very least they’d be on Mars and not here on Earth anymore